


Abyss

by zenstrike



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Dreams vs. Reality, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Keith (Voltron)-centric, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Pining Keith (Voltron), Socially Awkward Keith (Voltron), Unrequited Love, implied allurance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 18:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16000802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Keith can count the “arrivals” of his life on one hand. The life-changing sort. The ones that come along and inspire a little stirring in his belly, a little fear in his dreams. The social worker who tried her best for him for as long as she could, whose name he only half-remembers. Shiro, persistent and caring and making Keith wish he could do something—anything—to return a little of that love, that devotion, that warmth. Red, appearing like flashfire, swallowing him whole and making him mighty.Lance.- - -There’s a distance he can’t quite cross. Or maybe he never tries.





	Abyss

**Author's Note:**

> someone on tumblr requested no 18 from this list and while the sentence doesn’t appear exactly as it was prompted (or as dialogue) it’s the undercurrent of this whole ridiculous thing.
> 
> it’s not happy. i guess i considered a very particular view of k/l’s relationship and punched it. and maybe i considered a Very Particular view of keith’s character and ran with it and tried to...dismantle it...who knows wtf this is and i’m sorry it exists

    He’s always had vivid dreams. Or nightmares. When he was younger, he’d put his head down wherever he could and try to dream and conjure up a tangible vision of his father, like he could convince himself that he wasn’t forgetting his voice or his face or the warmth of his arms and laughter.

    There was a time in his life when he couldn’t sleep.

    And then Shiro came. Arrived.

    Keith can count the “arrivals” of his life on one hand. The life-changing sort. The ones that come along and inspire a little stirring in his belly, a little fear in his dreams. The social worker who tried her best for him for as long as she could, whose name he only half-remembers. Shiro, persistent and caring and making Keith wish he could do something—anything—to return a little of that love, that devotion, that warmth. Red, appearing like flashfire, swallowing him whole and making him mighty.

    Lance.

    The first night, Keith doesn’t sleep. He watches Shiro sleep. He waits for Shiro to wake. He listens to the others (not knowing they would become his family, not knowing they would become the home he returns to again and again) and he wishes them away and wishes Shiro awake and healed.

    The second night—or the first of whatever comes to pass for “night,” or the first chance they get to rest—Keith dreams of running his hands over Red’s barrier and when he finally gives in to his frustration he sees Lance. Lance, leaning against the barrier and his face awash in soft red light and his eyes bright, bright blue. The dream doesn’t get all the details of his face, or his voice, right. Keith doesn’t know him yet. But he knows his eyes. “Weren’t you paying attention?” the dream-Lance says and uncrosses his arms and—knocks. The barrier shatters into dancing stars and Keith watches them wash over Lance’s face and when he wakes all he can see is Lance’s smile.

    “Fuck,” he says to the ceiling. He squints. He considers. “What the fuck,” he amends.

    He tries to go back to sleep and fails so he sits up and traces the shape of his knife and runs his fingers over the ragged wrapping at the hilt. This is what he does: he hides. He has enough ghosts.

    When the alarm blares and he barrells down the halls and almost runs Pidge over, he forgets the dream. “You’re the actual worst,” he tells Lance, later.

    Lance waves a hand, dismissing Keith. “I can’t hear you over the atrocity that is your hair.”

    “That doesn’t even make sense.”

    Lance huffs but the banter is aborted and Keith realizes that Lance hasn’t looked at him, not really. So maybe Keith feels a little safe doing all the looking and all the watching, and maybe it’s just for the accuracy of his dreams because he knows—just knows—that he’ll be dreaming of Lance again.

    So he keeps himself awake for as long as he can on night three but his body is tired and his mind—his soul, maybe, but this space magic nonsense is too much—is exhausted so he drifts off eventually.

    Keith has never seen the ocean but he thinks it can’t be as blue as this, as the waves in his dreams. He doesn’t feel it washing over his knees but he imagines that it’s cold and that the sand under his feet scratches.

    “Just like my eyes,” the dream-Lance sighs and bumps their elbows together. “Romantic.”

    Keith scowls and dream-Lance smiles, wide and bright. Yes—just like his eyes.

    Keith is almost annoyed when he wakes up.

    It’s not the last dream. The dreams keep coming. Dream-Lance keeps smiling at him, and sometimes it’s soft and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes he grins, all teeth, like a challenge. Sometimes he spreads his arms and he shrugs and he laughs, like he’s reluctantly mocking Keith, even in Keith’s own dreamscape. Sometimes it’s soft, just a slight curve of his lips and those are the smiles that make Keith’s dream-heart pound and swell and make him wake feeling flushed and embarrassed and exposed. So he thinks about telling Lance—saying something like: “I think you should know—“ and “I’ll try to make it stop—“

 

***

 

    Distance.

 

***

 

    —he doesn’t even try. He stops looking at Lance. He tells himself it’s because the real thing doesn’t match up to the warmth of his dream-Lance.

    “I think a conversation would help,” Shiro says loftily one day, sounding half-distracted. He’s tapping his chin and squinting at something on the horizon but Keith isn’t falling for it. He knows that tone. He knows that _Shiro knows_ how to talk to Keith, and talk Keith into doing—things.

    “What?” Keith mutters.

    “You and Lance. Having a conversation. It would do you both some good.”

    “Right.”

    “Clear out the cobwebs.”

    “What does that even mean?”

    And then Shiro looks at him—full-on looks at him and it’s almost too much so Keith stares straight up at the sky and crosses his arms and tries his best to look as prickly as possible.

    That never works.

    “We’re a team now, Keith,” Shiro says, serious and heavy. “Time to reach out to your teammate.”

    Keith huffs.

    Shiro sighs and waits a moment more and then he turns around and starts back to the castle. Keith wrestles with himself for a moment and then bellows at Shiro’s back: “I’m not the problem!”

    “You’re half of it,” Shiro snaps back over his shoulder.

    In his dreams that night, Keith tells dream-Lance that Shiro is _annoying_ and _over-involved_ and _meddling_. And dream-Lance laughs at him and eats a cheeseburger in two bites.

    “Dude,” dream-Lance says. “I’m in your head. I know when you’re lying.”

    “I’m waking up now,” Keith grumbles, but he doesn’t. So he asks, feeling needy and desperate: “Why can’t we be like this?”

    Dream-Lance shrugs.

    He decides that dream-Lance and real-Lance are different people. Maybe he’s a sucker for a boy with pretty eyes. And he’s never seen eyes so blue or someone so freaking annoying—so of course he compensates, and he corrects. He constructs an ideal. He finds a friend in a ghost. He’s almost proud of himself.

    And then lines start blurring.

    He looks at Lance and he remembers something the dream-Lance had said the night before, the sound of his laughter. And Keith’s mouth goes dry and his stomach twists and he feels suddenly, terribly nauseous.

    “What?” Lance snaps.

    “Fuck off,” Keith replies.

    “Nice,” Lance mutters and turns his back to Keith.

    “You have to go,” Keith tells dream-Lance that night.

    Dream-Lance studies him. “Hey, Keith,” he says, slowly. “You realize I’m not real, right?”

    Keith reaches out and holds dream-Lance’s face between his hands. He forgets to breathe. He forgets to remember that he has legs, that he has a heart. “You feel real,” he says.

    And dream-Lance smiles.

    Keith wakes and wishes that real-Lance would smile at him. Just once. Just—properly. A smile just for Keith. A smile that Keith sparked. Not a second-hand smile, not overhang from a joke Hunk said or from a story Coran told.

    Keith wants real-Lance to look at him. Really look at him. Maybe catch Keith looking at him. Maybe Keith just wants an excuse to say: _I’ve been dreaming of you_.

    “I’m going to be nice to him today,” Keith says to the ceiling. He sounds pissed off. He wishes he could do something about that. Maybe take a pill. “I’m going to be so fucking nice he’s not going to know what to do.”

    And, determined, he gets out of bed.

    Later, he spits out: “I hate you.”

    And Lance, facedown on the training deck, groans. “Shut up,” he says against the floor.

    Keith scowls and covers his face with his hands. Hunk joins them a moment later, crashing into the ground with an ‘oof.’

    “Shiro’s going to kill you guys,” Hunk says. “We aren’t even going to make a _minute_. He’s going to yell.”

    “Shiro doesn’t yell,” Lance says.

    “He does,” Keith corrects. “He’s a really good yeller.”

    “ _Excuse me_ ,” Lance hisses and rolls onto his back. “I forgot I was in the presence of the Great Shiro Expert.”

    “Listen—“ Keith starts but then Pidge falls through and lands right on his stomach and they both shout (maybe scream).

    Keith thinks there’s probably a metaphor somewhere in the spinning, shrieking drones.

    Shiro doesn’t yell. He falls on his ass and looks at Keith and then at Lance and then he just shakes his head.

    That hurts. Lance’s smugness after hurts more.

    They clean up. Keith scrubs at his skin in the shower and thinks of all the things he’s going to tell dream-Lance later. They go their separate ways for a bit and Keith stares at his ceiling and tries to sleep but he replays training and every stupid conversation he’s had with real-Lance and tries to think of things he could have done better, better things he could have said.

    And then he worms back into his armour because they have a goddamn party to go to. He’s ready for another fight. He’s ready to pick a fight if Lance doesn’t.

    But they hover together—Keith, Lance, and Hunk—and somewhere along the way Keith realizes the tension’s all his: it’s in his shoulders, it bows his back, it makes his teeth clench.

    Lance is comfortable. Maybe he’s in his element. It’s infectious. And he starts talking, and Hunk starts talking, and Keith tries his hardest to participate and he feels like that goes noticed by the other two.

    Arusians bump into his legs. Keith says hello. Lance tells a joke and both Keith and Hunk laugh and Lance looks pleased and he smiles. It doesn’t last. Keith tries, but he realizes too late that there’s a wall up that he can’t see. Lance is homesick, he realizes as Lance turns away, hiding his sniffles and the start of tears.

    Keith realizes he hasn’t thought of Earth in days.

    And that’s what the distance between them looks like.

    Keith is frustrated, annoyed, unsettled, as he watches Lance leave. Hunk catches his attention and Keith throws himself into the party, into the warmth of it all, and he manages—just for a bit—to forget Lance and Lance’s sadness and Lance’s smile. He has fun. Genuine fun. His soreness eases. His shoulders relax. He laughs, properly, and he feels like there’s more laughter in his future. There’s a steadiness he’s never had before and he wishes, at the back of his mind, that he could share that steadiness with Lance.

    Except that it seems more like the others are really just clawing at normalcy, like they’re all reaching for something that feels “okay.” Home and family lingers for each of them and Keith’s disappointment, his frustration, surges back like fire.

    _Run_ , he wants to yell at Pidge and at Hunk and even at Lance. If they want to run—

   

***

 

    Distance.

 

***

 

    —Lance smiles at him. Just him. The pain and the smell and the feel of Lance’s hand in his are the only things that prove Keith isn’t dreaming. Real-Lance smiles at him, his eyes heavy and cloudy and his body trembling.

    Keith catches him as he falls, his breathing ragged, and it’s Keith who shouts for help.

    He waits. He watches Lance in the pod, looking sleepy and frozen and ethereal. Lance looks nothing like himself. Keith starts to forget what his voice sounds like, and even how blue his eyes are. He hovers, unwilling to touch the glass and unwilling to turn away, and he tries to summon up the courage to say something. Anything. They’ve had dozens of conversations. Lance knows things that Keith has never shared with anyone.

    At least, dream-Lance does. But in those days, as he waits for Lance to heal up and wake up, Keith doesn’t distinguish between them. He doesn’t dream.

    “Take a shower,” Pidge says, jabbing his ribs. “At least do us that solid.”

    “No,” Keith grumbles, batting her hands away.

    So Pidge gets Shiro.

    “Take a shower,” Shiro says. “Take a nap.”

    Keith struggles to refuse. He goes, taking slow steps away from Lance’s pod and Lance’s sleeping face. He’s afraid to turn around, to turn his back to Lance.

    He showers. He naps. He doesn’t dream. Or, if he does, he forgets. Makes himself forget.

    And then he keeps waiting. He’s impatient. He’s buzzing from the confusion of it all.

    And then Lance wakes up.   

    And nothing changes. _Nothing changes_. Keith throws himself in his way as much as he can, he all but screams: look at me. Lance’s eyes and attention seem to ghost over him. Keith had expected understanding, a shift under their feet. He feels like a child, reaching and grasping and missing and Lance is just ahead of him and Keith can’t—

 

***

 

    Distance.

 

***

 

    —how is he supposed to deal with this?

    “You’re in love with him,” dream-Lance teases and in the dream Keith slams the door and runs. He runs until he wakes and his chest heaves and he just wants to stop seeing it: no more smiles, no more potential. His dreamscape is like another universe, now. Like a parallel he can’t quite touch.

    “How do you pray?” he says to Shiro.

    Shiro blinks. “What?”

    Keith fidgets. “I mean—how does _anyone_ pray?”

    Shiro rubs the back of his neck. He grimaces. “I, uh. I don’t know, Keith.”

    Keith leaves before Shiro can ask a follow-up. He tries closing his eyes and tries imagining that he believes in some sort of higher power that can intervene in the crapshoot that’s his life.

    He starts praying—as best as he can—for a sex dream. Just one. Just anything besides the soft smiles and laughter and seaside handholding he has now. At least he can dismiss a sex dream. At least he can pin it all on his hormones and being stuck in space with three other teenagers, a space princess, and the closest thing to family he has. At least he would be able to look at Lance, after a sex dream.

    Now, maybe he avoids Lance, maybe that’s for the best—

 

***

 

    Distance.

 

***

 

    —but he wants to feel special. He yearns for it.

    Just a minute of his time.

    Keith avoids Lance until he can’t, until suddenly the whole universe seems upside down and they’re all readjusting. Suddenly weeks—months—of talking himself down from this, whatever _this_ is, goes flying out the window and Keith feels something a little like hope stirring in the pit of his stomach. He wishes he could talk to Shiro. He wishes he could find his brother, wherever he is, and just having him explain all of it away.

    Is he in love with Lance? How would he know? Keith has never been in love before. He’s never felt this tremble in his hands and the twist in his stomach and the butterflies in his throat. He’s never felt so—insistent. So desperate for another person’s attention, except maybe Shiro’s but _that_ hadn’t felt like _this_.

    Lance is everywhere now and Keith needs him to be everywhere. They’re a good team. Keith couldn’t lead without him. Lance is a calming presence on his right. Lance is steady and sure and he calls Keith out on his bullshit. Lance doesn’t hesitate to tell Keith when he’s wrong, and he supports Keith exactly when he needs to. Keith starts to think that maybe, just maybe, they could be friends. They could be a good team. They could make Voltron better, stronger, steadier—together.

    Except one day, finally, he looks away from Lance and he sees Allura.

    He isn’t quite sure what he’s seeing. Not at first.

    It’s a delicate tilt to her head. There’s a twist at the edge of her lips that he’s never seen before. She touches her chin, thoughtful.

    He isn’t the only one looking.

    Something ugly and harsh roars under his skin. Jealousy. Fear. Horror. He chokes on it. He can’t voice it. He can’t say: I saw him first.

    And under all that is something warmer, something calmer, something braver. He can’t say: it’s about time.

    “You should be appreciated,” Keith says to dream-Lance, hugging his knees and feeling the world of his dreams whirl around them. He tries to close his eyes against the nauseating colour of it all but his dream has torn away his control and he just keeps staring and keeps imagining getting lost in dream-Lance’s eyes. “I’m glad.”

    Dream-Lance reaches for him but his hand passes through Keith like air, like a ghost. “Yeah?” he says.

    No.

    Keith wants to scream the truth. He wants to admit to a thousand insecurities, a thousand dark fantasies of trapping Lance in a room, of making him listen—of making him _see_.

    No, making him look.

    “Don’t,” dream-Lance sighs. “You’ll mess it up.”

    Yes.

    Keith tries to close his eyes again and he fails. He falls into swirling colour and feels his own breathing fade.

    “Say it again,” dream-Lance says, and maybe he’s taunting Keith. “Say you’re glad.”

    Keith will be the first to admit he’s a terrible liar.

    He opens his eyes and what he remembers, first, on waking is Lance’s smile and Lance’s hand in his and he tries to convince himself that none of that was real, none of that was solid, it was all in his—

 

***

 

    Distance.

 

***

 

    —he’s sure.

    He feels dirty and disgusted with himself. He feels guilty, like he’s the one who’s made Lance feel unnecessary, unneeded, unwanted.

    Maybe he has.

    He leaves. And he’s sure. And he doesn’t let himself look back.

    He doesn’t dream of Lance again.

 

***

 

    _Distance_.

 

***

   

    The Quantum Abyss doesn’t let him forget. He’s terrified of his dreams being exposed. He’s afraid to see dream-Lance again, with his too-perfect smile and his too-perfect eyes. It makes sense, then, that he’s startled when he sees himself and Lance in the dim emergency lighting of the castle, that he’s startled when he sees Lance smile at him, that he’s startled when he watches Lance collapse into his arms and Keith catch him.

    His voice sounds strange and high-pitched as he calls for help, as he tries to wake Lance.

“Who is that?” his mother asks after and there are layers of confusion and uncertainty that cloud his vision of her so he stares at his feet.

    “Lance,” Keith says and the name feels like something unfinished on his tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> i’m going back to fluff now


End file.
